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Overview
The author of the bestseller Freud presents a close examination of the aggression--and debate about aggression--that raged through the Victorian Age. Gay looks at the works of such figures as Theodore Roosevelt and Nietzsche to present penetrating new insights.
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Details
- ISBN-13: 9780393312249
- ISBN-10: 0393312240
- Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
- Publish Date: August 1993
- Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.14 x 1.26 inches
- Shipping Weight: 2.21 pounds
- Page Count: 716
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THE CULTIVATION OF HATRED
by Peter Gay
Norton, $29.95
Review by Roger Bishop
"I have written this book to show that the nineteenth century (in Europe and the United States) was an age of aggressive destruction and construction both, an age in which respectable culture made more determined efforts than ever to cultivate hatred - and needed to."
So writes Peter Gay, Sterling Professor of History at Yale University and author of The Cultivation of Hatred, the third of his projected five-volume study The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud. The first volume, The Education of the Senses, dealt with sexuality. The second, The Tender Passion, focused on love. The new book documents how "conscious and contentious attitudes toward aggression coexisted with aggressive ideas and acts that were not recognized as such. In that situation - and it was frequent - the historian's hindsight must serve to clarify what in its own time remained obscure." The result is a fascinating exploration of social and intellectual history, literature, and psychology. Concerning the last of these, Gay, a noted scholar of the life and work of Sigmund Freud, is the author of the widely acclaimed Freud: A Life for Our Time.
Gay notes that "Every culture, every class, every century, constructs its distinctive alibis for aggression . . . what the nineteenth century bourgeoisie added to, or amended in, traditional reasons why certain pugnacious activities are appropriate, ethical, even commanded by nature, amounts to a recognizable cultural style." Whether the issue was justifications for capital or corporal punishment, the appropriate approaches to politics in an age of democratization, what constituted manliness or womanliness, the right of a woman to effectively assert herself at home and in the world, the conflict between science and religion, and so much else, the age took its conflicts seriously. Of course, "It was a striking feature of nineteenth-century culture that influential justifications for aggression relied on what their partisans advertised as scientific proof."
The publication of Darwin's The Origin of Species in 1859 unleashed a flood of polemics both for and against his ideas and led to Social Darwinism. It may surprise many to read that Herbert Spencer, the most avidly read promoter of competition, was actually not a Darwinian at all. He did coin the slogan "the survival of the fittest," but he "showed himself sanguine about the world. The signs of the times indicated to him that an era was approaching when the shackles of prejudice would be shaken off, when reason and truth rather than feelings and the worship of precedent would become men's guide." He saw the need to civilize hatred.
Gay writes, "This humane side of Spencer, strictly circumscribing his famous alibi for aggressive competition, pervaded his writings throughout the decades . . . In short, the best-known, best-loved advocate of individual liberty and economic competition found some uses for the noble submergence of self in the service of others." For Gay, "what makes Spencer a representative Victorian of supreme interest is that he was no slave to doctrine, not even his own."
Gay also details the thought or mindset of a wide range of American Social Darwinists, William Graham Sumner, Jack London, Andrew Carnegie, and John D. Rockefeller among them.
"Coarse though the essential doctrine of Social Darwinism proved to be . . . It survived so tenaciously because it gratified a perennial psychological need: the urge to split the world into heroes and villains, persons and policies wholly good and wholly bad. Only racism could compete with it."
There is so much more in this rich tapestry, including discussions of George Sand, George Eliot, Dickens, and Thackeray, among the major writers, and the work of such distinguished social scientists as Charles Booth and Lujo Brentano.
Roger Bishop is Contributing Editor of this publication.
THE CULTIVATION OF HATRED
by Peter Gay
Norton, $29.95
Review by Roger Bishop
"I have written this book to show that the nineteenth century (in Europe and the United States) was an age of aggressive destruction and construction both, an age in which respectable culture made more determined efforts than ever to cultivate hatred - and needed to."
So writes Peter Gay, Sterling Professor of History at Yale University and author of The Cultivation of Hatred, the third of his projected five-volume study The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud. The first volume, The Education of the Senses, dealt with sexuality. The second, The Tender Passion, focused on love. The new book documents how "conscious and contentious attitudes toward aggression coexisted with aggressive ideas and acts that were not recognized as such. In that situation - and it was frequent - the historian's hindsight must serve to clarify what in its own time remained obscure." The result is a fascinating exploration of social and intellectual history, literature, and psychology. Concerning the last of these, Gay, a noted scholar of the life and work of Sigmund Freud, is the author of the widely acclaimed Freud: A Life for Our Time.
Gay notes that "Every culture, every class, every century, constructs its distinctive alibis for aggression . . . what the nineteenth century bourgeoisie added to, or amended in, traditional reasons why certain pugnacious activities are appropriate, ethical, even commanded by nature, amounts to a recognizable cultural style." Whether the issue was justifications for capital or corporal punishment, the appropriate approaches to politics in an age of democratization, what constituted manliness or womanliness, the right of a woman to effectively assert herself at home and in the world, the conflict between science and religion, and so much else, the age took its conflicts seriously. Of course, "It was a striking feature of nineteenth-century culture that influential justifications for aggression relied on what their partisans advertised as scientific proof."
The publication of Darwin's The Origin of Species in 1859 unleashed a flood of polemics both for and against his ideas and led to Social Darwinism. It may surprise many to read that Herbert Spencer, the most avidly read promoter of competition, was actually not a Darwinian at all. He did coin the slogan "the survival of the fittest," but he "showed himself sanguine about the world. The signs of the times indicated to him that an era was approaching when the shackles of prejudice would be shaken off, when reason and truth rather than feelings and the worship of precedent would become men's guide." He saw the need to civilize hatred.
Gay writes, "This humane side of Spencer, strictly circumscribing his famous alibi for aggressive competition, pervaded his writings throughout the decades . . . In short, the best-known, best-loved advocate of individual liberty and economic competition found some uses for the noble submergence of self in the service of others." For Gay, "what makes Spencer a representative Victorian of supreme interest is that he was no slave to doctrine, not even his own."
Gay also details the thought or mindset of a wide range of American Social Darwinists, William Graham Sumner, Jack London, Andrew Carnegie, and John D. Rockefeller among them.
"Coarse though the essential doctrine of Social Darwinism proved to be . . . It survived so tenaciously because it gratified a perennial psychological need: the urge to split the world into heroes and villains, persons and policies wholly good and wholly bad. Only racism could compete with it."
There is so much more in this rich tapestry, including discussions of George Sand, George Eliot, Dickens, and Thackeray, among the major writers, and the work of such distinguished social scientists as Charles Booth and Lujo Brentano.
Roger Bishop is Contributing Editor of this publication.